This one’s a monster, just close the tab and walk away.

Still here?

Really?

[Deep sigh]

Okay. Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you (and please do know that I am sorry. Had I more time and energy I might be able to learn the skill and discipline involved in concision but I have so much work and so many children and so little sleep and am so lazily focused on thinking out my own little thoughts…)

Ahem

Now then.

New Left Review’s web feature Sidecar recently ran two pieces I like very much, “Material Interests” by Dylan Riley and “Alternative Horizons” by Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams, the latter article replying to, and running with elements of, the former. They’re both good pieces and I recommend them. If you’re reading this now and haven’t read them, stop reading this and go read them. They’re short. The Riley is just slightly over 600 words (if you don’t live by word counts that’s equivalent to around two and a half double spaced pages), the Gilbert and Williams is just under 1100 words (just over 4 double spaced pages). They’re both good examples of short form theoretical writing done very well, which I admire and wish I was better at. (I’m sure editorial hands behind the scenes at NLR helped with this, but still.) If my recommendation alone isn’t enough for you to go read them then first of all who do you think you are, and second of all how can you live with knowing you hurt me so badly, and third of all to summarize briefly Riley argues that the concept of ‘material interest’ used by a lot of Marxists is conceptually confused, while Gilbert and Williams argue for what they think is a better alternative conception for use in left politics and Marxist analysis. I’m now going to assume anyone who reads further has read both essays. If you read further without reading the essays, I am not responsible for what will happen - outbreak of hives, perpetual darkness, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all of that will be on you. (Please forgive my failing sense of humor. Or don’t. Get mad at it, young believers. Let fury have the hour, anger can be power.)

In my view, ‘material interest’ is a category to jettison pretty much entirely. We might keep it around in vestigial form, analogous to how we atheists still might say ‘my god!’ and ‘good lord!’ in certain moments without any real belief, but we shouldn’t attempt to use it for analytical purposes. I lay out more of why I think this later. I can’t tell if Riley agrees with that or not, his essay reads as either ambivalent or unclear on that, while Gilbert and Williams offer a qualified recommendation of talk of interests combined with a reformulation of what ‘interests’ actually means. I like the content of that reformulation but still would prefer to drop the term. The former matters more than the latter really - what they say in their version of what ‘interests’ could or should mean is interesting and wortwhile, more on that later in the post.

Among the things I like in the Gilbert and Williams is how they historically situate the decline and return of interest-talk on the left. They assert, and I assume rightly so, that the view Riley criticizes - that there is something real in the world called ‘material interests’ that determines or should determine political action - is a renewal of what as a longstanding truism on the left. The fortunes of that truism declined for a while in or after the 1970s due to a mix of factors including theoretical criticisms from within the left, the rise of militant movements that weren’t explained by that truism, and criticisms from the right as “the restoration of liberal hegemony in the academy created a fertile environment for individualistic, psychologistic and idealist interpretations.” Gilbert and Williams imply that the return to interest-talk has some upsides at the very least because it may arise from some positive developments - “a salutary course correction,” as they put it. This situates their response, and Riley’s essay, as a kind of sympathetic criticism of the unnamed interest-talking Marxists, basically saying ‘let’s do the salutary course correction even better.’ I appreciate that as a rhetorical posture taken for political effect (it’s harder to attack), as just being, I don’t know, nice, and having a spirit of comradeliness. (Some people on the left may be genuine opponents of other people on the left in important respects but that kind of opposition is significantly different from the kind of opposition that characterizes the relationship of people on the left and political actors not on the left.) All of that said, there’s also a more negative reading that seems to me also plausible, which is that the relative revival of Marx and Marxism in US left circles since 2010 or so involves some unfortunate replaying of old debates and reanimating of positions previously put to bed. (It turns out the dustbin of history doesn’t have a lid, so to speak.)

As part of fleshing out a view distinct from and superior to that of his unnamed targets, Riley writes that “people live toward their future as they understand and imagine it.” That seems to me to be pretty much incontrovertible. He then states that because of this fact, it is “a fundamental error to base one’s politics on an appeal to a given status – a present state of social being – and the interests supposed to flow from that.” I agree that this is a fundamental error but it’s unclear to me that the reason why it’s an error is because “people live toward the future.” Riley thne adds that “anthropologically well-grounded politics entails the attempt to mobilize groups and classes around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances. Interests are ‘material’ to the extent that they emerge from those objective circumstances.” This strikes me as ambiguous, as follows.

I don’t know what “anthropologically well-grounded politics” means or what is at stake in the implied distinction between well- and ill-grounded. Are anthropologically ill-grounded politics impossible? Doomed to fail to achieve their stated objectives? Doomed to fail according to any reasonable criteria of evaluation whatsoever? Something else? It’s also unclear what “a future that is possible for them” means. Is this a matter of actually feasible futures, or of futures that are believed in? Given that Riley says “people live toward their future as they understand and imagine it” I assume he’s referring to believed-in futures rather than actually feasible futures. (I can of course understand how belief in a genuinely impossible future can end up a problem, but that strikes me as not worth worrying much about because I think people are generally smart enough to not believe such things.)

Gilbert and Williams talk about the role of futures in a somewhat different way and one I like better, so let me go there for a moment. They argue that there are “bundles of capacities that members of social groups could realise under certain circumstances.” As a shorthand for this I’m going to say ‘potentials.’ (To be clear that quote is from how they define ‘interests.’ As I said I’m not convinced by this specifically as recommendation that we should keep saying ‘interests’ but I also think litigating ‘do we or do we not keep this word?’ is not particularly worthwhile, whereas this notion of situationally-realizable capacities strikes me as very worthwhile.)

Some potentials are, to borrow Gilbert and Williams’s words, “realisable within the current historical context” - that is, they are “achievable goals within an existing political framework” - while others “could only be realised given a more significant change in socio-economic circumstances.” They stress that this distinction is more continuum than stark either/or. That continuum is also something of a timeline and a measure of possibility over time: different potentials have different “horizons of realisability” that are closer or further from the present, involve a lighter or heavier collective lift, require less or greater rearrangement of society, etc. That is, there are some projects that “could only be realised in a distantly imaginable future” and others which are more short term and could be or already “have been articulated by existing political movements,” with those “understood as ‘demands’ active on the field of political contention.”

I think there’s a minor conceptual slippage in that last point, from some potentials being realizable in the short term to some potentials being a matter of things that exist in the present in negative form, as demands. That’s not a big deal but it muddies the waters a little on what it means to think in terms of realizable capacities or achievable goals, because a demand might be acted upon in the world without being achievable. To put it very simply, a demand doesn’t have to be deliverable or winnable. It’s arguable that a demand is only advisable if winnable, but that’s another matter - an ill-advised demand is not, because ill-advised, a non-demand.

That quibble on my part aside, Gilbert and Williams’s placing of these matters in time is correct and important. They in effect ask us to think of a sort of escalating or cascading set of futures where struggles change social conditions (and as part of that, change the participants in struggle), with those changed conditions being the context for new struggles, in what is hopefully a virtuously ascending spiral from terrible present to better future and better still more distant future. This temporal framing is also beneficial for helping understand some important political complexities regarding what people want (or will settle for) at different times. In the short term, especially in a context of serious threats of increasing misery of various kinds, people can understandably focus on defensive fights that are in important respects zero-sum within the working class - ‘look nothing personal but I have to look out for me and mine’ kinda thing. Scabbing is an easy example. Teamster President Sean O’Brien endorsing President Trump is another I’d argue that a more salient and largely uncriticized example for us in the US is UAW President Shawn Fain’s endorsement of Biden’s candidacy mid-genocide in Gaza. (It’s an ugly fact that the dominant positions in much of the U.S. labor movement have often been variations on nationalism and willingness to sacrifice internationalist values and Fain’s Biden endorsement was a continuation of that reality. For more on this, see Jeff Schurke’s book.)

Gilbert and Williams stress that a major task for the left is to oppose that sort of short-term-focused defensiveness that fosters (or just is!) political conservatism, which means “encourag[ing] people to orient their political behaviour towards a ‘higher’ or further possible horizon – in a sense, towards the least immediately viable future.” I take this to mean that socialists are, in the capital-dominated world as it currently exists, voices of a not immediately plausible or easily realizable future. This means that “the building of class consciousness is in part a project of encouraging individuals and collectives to orient themselves to a horizon beyond that of immediate self-defence: to instil belief in the plausibility of alternatives." This building is a key “part of the role of radical agitation, of political speculation and of utopian art and culture is to gesture towards the alternative worlds and ways of being beyond the ambit of immediate need. Such visions have the potential to evolve our collective sense of what the future might be.” I agree, and this is how I read Marx and Engels’s remark in the Communist Manifesto that “communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”

Having said all of that, I do balk at some of the remarks about futures and in a way that I think may not be just terminological. I have two and a half reservations. One, what degree of concreteness is required (or, what degree of abstraction is permitted) for an imagined future to count for these authors as an imagined future. In my view, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to ability’ is an imagined future, though in very compressed form. Likewise, at a similar degree of compression, in the third volume of Capital Marx imagines a condition where there are two interrelated practices/ domains/types of freedom, one where the work of producing what society collectively wants and needs is done in a democratic fashion by freely associated producers carrying out production rationally “with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature” and the other being a growing availability of time outside of that work, with such time being a matter of “that development of human energy which is an end in itself” and is “the true realm of freedom.” For me anyway, that’s enough future, for the most part. (I hope my remarks below will make clear I say “for the most part.”) The half reservation is that I think there’s a bit of a tendency in the present for what Marx called writing recipes for the cook shops of the future and the future talk in these essays sounds to me kind of like that. As someone with a left-libertarian sensibility, I want everyone to get what they want, so if there are people who want cookbooks for kitchens that don’t exist yet, well, I’m glad they get to enjoy those cookbooks I guess, but I am just not in the audience for them. I just don’t crave such recipes. I’m very content with Walter Benjamin’s remarks that “assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations” is a mistake because the working class’s “hate and “its spirit of sacrifice”, two major sources of power for the class, “both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.” This is the flip side of - or maybe an alternative to? certainly an important inflection of - Riley’s point that “people live toward the future.” (Sounding a Benjaminian note, EP Thompson once wrote that “‘progress’ is a concept either meaningless or worse, when imputed as an attribute to the past, which can only acquire a meaning from a particular position in the present, a position of value in search of its own genealogy.” I talked a bit more about some of that Thompson quote in this essay as part of an argument that labor history ought to conceptualize class per se as a category of subordination. I also tried to suggest though I’m not sure how successfully that we should think, with Thompson, that history is an inherently normative enterprise.)

And now, reservation two. Riley writes that “class struggle is fundamentally about which futures are, and are not, realizable in present conditions.” That seems right to me insofar as struggle is always over some future (at a very simple level ‘I want to win’ ‘no I want to win’ are two futures in contestation), though surely such possible futures are also not entities “with causal power over living individuals who are their bearers.” (As you will remember because you followed my recommendation to read Riley’s essay, that’s how Riley’s opponents treat ‘interests’, a treatment Riley dismisses as theological and idealist, some of the biggest swear words Marxists have.) What I assume Riley means is that imagined futures and class struggle have an important mutually-conditioning relationship, with imagined futures helping motivate participation in struggle and with participation in struggle changing imagined futures.

Part of makes me unsure here is that Riley distinguishes between futures which are and are not “realizable in present conditions.” I think I get what an unrealizable future is. It is, or is something like, a demand that can’t be met. What I don’t get is why realizability in present conditions matters, nor do I understand what I means to speak of possible futures which are “embedded in historical reality” as distinct from those (presumably impossible?) futures which are not so embedded. What I mean to say is, it is unclear to me what ‘possible future’ really refers to, given Riley’s emphasis not on what futures actually eventuate in the world but rather on futures that exist in the political imaginations of present actors. Is there a difference within these categories/this framework between ‘actually possible future which is believed in,’ ‘actually impossible future which is nonetheless believed to be possible,’ and ‘future the possibility of which is genuinely unknown at present but which is still believed to be possible’? Emphasis on futures specifically as imagined suggests no, but I can’t tell and reference to some futures being “realizable in present conditions” points toward something that is not just a matter of what people believe.

Likewise, Riley writes that it might “make sense to say that a steel mill worker in nineteenth-century Germany had an interest in socialism” but “it makes little sense to say that a serf in thirteenth-century England had” such an interest, because for the German steelworker but not for the English serf, socialism “was among the possible futures embedded in historical reality.” I find “possible futures embedded in historical reality” fairly opaque. If these futures are entirely a matter of what is believed, then whether or not some serfs believed in something like socialism is largely a matter best left to empirical investigation and interpretation by historians. If these futures are not just a matter of beliefs then this contrast of serf and steelwork seems to make more sense at first but I’m not sure if the concepts for which the distinction is a shorthand bear scrutiny. This will get even wonkier and I’m terribly sorry, please bear with me.
Was socialism possible in 1811? I’d say yes, but then, I think it was possible in the 13th century too. (In my view wherever class society has existed there has also existed a possibility, however faint, for struggle in that society to abolish classes as such, precipitating a transformation of that society into a version of communism. I think this is not subject to proof but I also think its denial via appeal to developments that are necessary preconditions - the properly riped productive forces and so forth - can only be asserted at pain of reducing politics to technical matters. Since we know the latter to be wrong - emancipation from political subordination has no significant technological preconditions and degree of technological development does not determine political relationships; it only appears to do so because technology mediates and is a form of appearance of calss relations - I’m content to assume the former is correct despite my inability to prove it. Anyway.) Riley’s remark seems to me to only make sense if one assumes he either believes socialism was objectively impossible in 13th century England or he believes no one in that period had the idea thus it was not present in the politically imagined futures of that time.

For the moment and strictly for the sake of argument I’ll concede the point that socialism was objectively impossible in 13th century England. In that case, Riley would be correct in writing that “it makes little sense to say that a serf in thirteenth-century England had an interest in socialism” but I suspect the reason why (or the manner in which) it makes little sense is not the reason Riley suggests. In my view, as I will elaborate on at tedious length below, ‘interest’ is really just a category of judgement. When a Marxist says that some individual, group, or class acts in accord to their ‘material interests’ that Marxist is really just saying something like ‘that was a reasonable thing to do in that situation’ or ‘they did what was best for them then and there.’ With that sense of ‘interest’ in mind, again assuming for the sake of argument that socialism was impossible until, say, 1811, it’s still not wrong to say a 13th century serf had an interest in socialism so much as it’s trivially true - they would still be better off under socialism, even if socialism wasn’t achievable then, and since it wasn’t achievable then, that they’d be better off is a trivial observation. Now, what about those 19th century German steel workers? Google tells me that there were steelworks in Germany as early as 1811. That means, as it turned out, socialism didn’t eventuate in the lifetimes of a lot of 19th century German steelworkers.

In what sense then, and why, was socialism a ‘possible future’ within their lifetimes? As I tried to say, I think that only makes sense if we’re talking about either some kind of objective preconditions for socialism, or if we’re talking about the empirical matter of whether or not people actually imagined socialism. Neither of those seems quite right to me, and both opens onto a series of questions of specification that I think can’t really be answered and which in my view recommends against this framing in this particular bit of Riley’s essay. (I stress here that I do like the essay very much; that I nitpick some of it here may not feel like I do, but, well, I just do. Given how short it is, I’ve not spent time repeating the points I like because you should have already read those points for yourself as per my earlier orders!)

To try to draw out some of what I have in mind, let me try this analogy. Consider leaded gasoline. It’s a horrid product that hurt a lot of people. Anyone living who was responsible for it should be put on trial and anyone descended from people who made a pile of money from it should have most of their money taken away. Its relative elimination made the world a better place, reducing suffering. In that sense, it can be said reasonably as a description that the elimination of leaded gasoline was in the interest of the working class (I stress that this doesn’t explain anything though, a point I shall belabor below, brace yourself.)

Given that leaded gasoline was largely eliminated, activists working to bring about that elimination were mobilizing, in Riley’s words, “around a project to realize a future that is possible for them under a given set of determinant historical circumstances.” A world relatively free of leaded gasoline was a future which was realizable.
But… when was it realizable? Was it a realizable future at every point in the existence of leaded gasoline, or only at some later point due to something about the political situation and the balance of class forces and so on? I think these questions are not productive, which means I feel a little bad asking them (luckily I love to feel bad, a goth sensibility cultivated by a midwestern upbringing, catholic high school, and years of grad school…!), but my point is that the idea of realizable futures embedded in a specific historical moment invites these questions in ways that recommend against that idea.

In my view Gilbert and Williams provide a way out of these issues, implicitly suggesting a reformulaton - what seems to me like a friendly amendment, and one I’d vote for were I a member of some senate governing over Dylan Riley’s writing (a man can dream, can’t he…?) - of the part of Riley’s essay I’m nitpicking. Gilbert and Williams don’t quite say this but I think the implication is very clear: we’re not talking about entities out in the world independent of observation. We’re actually talking about sets of concepts that serve to helps us as situated actors who exist within the context of - as participants in the ongoing production-through-struggle of - our whole way of life as a culture/society, and specifically as actors who are trying to help our fellow denizens of this society to think through their experiences and draw conclusions. (This point is me borrowing from the unfortunately still limited amount I’ve read of Raymond Williams and of the Negt and Kluge proletarian public sphere book.) We’re active participants in the ongoing processing of the experiences systematically generated by this society and the formulation of respsonse to those experiences and the forces generating them. With that in mind, the kinds of questions I’m asking - but what about serfs, what about the possibility of socialism in the 13th century - are errors of taking some of the logical entailments too literally and/or forgetting the actual purpose of these concepts. In that sense, thinking about what kinds of futures people do and don’t and should and shouldn’t imagine is a worthy, valuable activity, especially when conducted in the spirit of Gilbert, Williams, and the Communist Manifesto. In that sense, then, ideas of ‘possible futures’ and what is or isn’t realizable under this or that context is not so much a matter of dispassionate analysis of something way over there, and is more a matter of partisan analysis in allegiance to a project of struggle by people already in motion. This means we don’t need to concern ourselves with all possible futures or questions about what realizability actually consists in, it means we should be trying to be attuned to what’s actually happening, broadly construed, and talking about what it means for real people and how it might be dealt with in the short and long term (and how to deal with the recurring capitalism-produced tension between how what’s best for some people short term is often bad for many people long term, and vice versa; a ‘dealing with’ that isn’t subject to being solved theoretically and just has to be fought and/or reasoned and/or hugged out in specific conjunctures, over and over and over until quite a while after capitalism has been ended).

Changing gears momentarily, one further nitpick, or maybe a development of a prior nitpick (and after that things will get even more tedious, just you wait! We plumb the depths of boredom and soar the dull heights of tedium here at Open Mode in order to deliver YOU with the insomnia cure that YOU deserve! Open Mode: it’s what’s for dinner.) Above I said, or tried to say, that I have a reservation about how concrete a description of the future must be, or how abstract it’s allowed to be, to count as an imagined future within the terms of both of these essays. Part of what I had in mind saying that is the bit of Riley’s essay about harms.

Riley writes against the “attempt to develop a critique of capitalism by listing its ‘harms’,” which he characterizes as “the negative counterpart to interests.” He says this attempt must fail because “harms’ are only politically relevant if they are linked to historical alternatives.” He goes on to say that harms such as “inefficiency, a systemic bias toward consumerism, environmental destruction, limiting democracy” and so on,” a list apparently drawn from the work of Erik Olin Wright, who I’ve not read much by, “do not constitute a critique of capitalism because many could be applied to any form of social production, including socialism.” That seems mistaken to me.

First of all, that many harms on the list apply to other forms of society is irrelevant to whether harm is a useful critical category. For Riley’s point against emphasis on harm to work, all of the harms would have to be present in all societies and by specifying “many” he implicitly concedes this is not the case. Furthermore, even if all harms present in capitalism are in fact present in all societies - a point that fits with the dominant common sense of this society but which seems to me like something Marxists should not concede - for the point to do the work Riley implies it does, those harms would have to be equally or more present in all noncapitalist societies. That is, even if all those harms are present in all societies, if they are more present in capitalism because of something about capitalism then the ‘listing of harms’ actually is a worthwhile critical enterprise, to some degree anyway. (I think it’s also worth noting that generally speaking Marxists tend to want the end of capitalism to end class per se. Class is itself a category of structural injustice and harm generation and since capitalism is not the first class society, capitalism is also not the only unjust and harmful society. If we were trying to establish that capitalism is the worst of all class societies then Riley’s point about harms in capitalism being also present in some other societies would be more relevant. Insofar as our as socialists is ‘abolish class’ then we don’t need to bother with figuring out our preferences among different kinds of class societies, we can just take Marx as a guide to help us understand the actual class society we’re in, in the hope of ending it and ending class per se.)

The other thing I’ll say is that generally speaking the harms of capitalism are themselves conceptualized specifically as wrongs. Marxists who talk about the harms of capitalism generally treat those harms as different in character from the harms of earthquakes or the harms involved in inevitable losses that are in a sense existential - like the fact that all of us eventually get old and pass way, such that some people will have to experience the loss of loved ones. My point here is to distinguish between harms which are terrible but aren’t exactly wrongs, and harms which are wrongs. The line between them is blurry and in important respects subjective in a way somewhat similar to futures as imagined. I’m not invested in arguing that some things are harms but not wrongs. Rather, I’m invested in arguing that some harms are wrongs and are understood as such. This matters for Rileys argument, it seems to me, because implied in the sense of being wronged is the sense that the wrong didn’t have to happen and that future similar kinds of wrongs could be prevented by changing the circumstances that created the wrongs. (This is part of why it’s significant that Engels used the term ‘social murder’ rather than ‘social determinants of health’.) What I’m driving toward here is that in my view Riley is mistaken in contrasting what he calls the listing of wrongs, on the one hand, and the positing of alternate futures, on the other hand. To conceptualize some phenomenon as a wrong implies an alternative future, one without similar such wrongs, at least to some degree and even if only negatively. I think this is baked in to the concept of being wrong as such, but at the very least it’s a loud subtext in any Marxist account of capitalism as harm-generating that I’m familiar with, and is certainly the case in Marx and Engels’s writings on these matters.

I’ve gone on far too long (again, still, and not for the last time) but this has helped me clarify some of my thinking, which is the point. As I’ve tried to say, I like all the negative parts of Riley’s essay (as far as I can tell everything he wants to knock down I also want to see knocked down), and I like those parts very, very much. I hope you’ve already read it. I initially started this by talking about why I liked the essay at some length then decided to cut all that as this was already going to be too long. In doing that ‘here’s why I like it’ bit I also went on to try to lay out my own attempt at opposing interest-talk, borrowing heavily from Goran Therborn as I mentioned above. I’m going to paste all of that below in case it’s of interest to anyone. No worries if not! I’ll sign off here — keep on trucking, dear friends and gentle hearts, and I hope as you trek the path of love and logic that your burdens are as few as possible!

*

In this final bit, written before the rest of this whole mess, I attempt to make my own case against interest-talk, in part trying to think with Riley and in part borrowing from Goran Therbon. I can only really think via analogies, sorry, and this one feels inadequate, sorry again (Analogies and Apologies is the new working title for the memoir I’ll never write), but -- in my one and only session I ever had with a physical trainer the trainer found that I tend to roll one of my ankles inward at the bottom of a squat. In the long term that movement pattern constitutes a risk for possible injury and even without injury it’s less efficient and effective hence is something that would slow down progress on squatting more weight. In one sense, I clearly have an interest in correcting this movement pattern. But, to borrow the Althusser-ism again, all obviousness is an ideological effect, which is to say, on the one hand it’s worth asking why I have this interest and on the other hand the felt sense that I clearly do have this interest tends to point away from even asking. I have this interest insofar as I want to avoid injury and achieve an athletic goal. That is, I have this interest specifically as a function of a defined concrete context. (As it turns out I’m not very concerned about it because shortly after that I started a job as a tenure-track professor then had a third kid and as it turns out jobs and kids are also very effective at slowing down progress on the achievement of a great many aspirations....)

What I’m trying to get at is that my ‘interest’ in stopping rolling my ankle inward under load is not actually similar to the ‘interest’ of the working class, where interest is a term for use in critical social thinking and in left politics. There are sometimes contexts when workers clearly have interests in a way that’s analogous to my ‘interest’ in fixing my ankle - like in most unionization drives for instance - but there are many contexts that are not nearly so clear and the concept of ‘interests’ doesn’t do much to help us tell if we’re in one of those clear contexts or an unclear context.

Furthermore, there’s a category mistake or a similar sort of error in treating the working class in its relationship to the capitalist class as the first sort of context - treating “material interests [as] deriving from [classes’] position in a system of property relations,” as Riley puts it. That is, while class is a vital category of analysis - because a crucial social relationship in the actual world - necessary for doing any worthwhile left politics or analysis, a theoretical understanding of class is a preliminary to and a resource for such politics and analysis, not a substitute for such.
I will add that in my view, treating interests as given in the world and needing merely to be found is something that lends itself well to would-be condescending saviors, as follows: we, the few knowers of the social, will discover the true interests of the many non-knowers of the social, then we or our acolytes shall declare that truth to those many in order to awaken them, and then those thus awakened will act accordingly. Tiny domino tips little domino tips medium domino tips big domino - revolutionary process as avalanche, a view predicated on, in Riley’s words, “forget[ting] that ‘members’ of classes are people” who think and act individually and collectively. Would-be tiny dominoes often get frustrated by the failure of little dominos to tip upon contact with the truth of ‘material interest,’ and thus set about a mix of grumping (a recent grump-target among this sort of Marxist being, to again quote Riley, “the tendency of centre-left parties to pursue something called identity politics” instead of focusing on class) and despairing about workers’ apparent unwillingness or incapacity to follow the way, the truth, and the light of revealed interests.

Uncharitable (but warranted! [I hereby grind my teeth]) characterizations of some other left positions aside, part of what I’m trying to draw out here is that ‘interest’ in all of this really just a synonym for ‘the thing which would, given current conditions and commitments, be best to do.’ Such a category is fine in contexts when and where it makes sense to take conditions and commitments as given, but we need to be able to tell those contexts from other contexts. Simply assuming that the general relationship of proletariat as class to capitalists as class is such a context or necessarily produces such contexts is an error.

I like Goran Therborn on the limits of ‘interest’ as category of analysis. In his What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules? he writes that “Marxists who have employed the notion of class interest have encountered great difficulty in giving it a precise empirical meaning; and, whether or not it is agreed that application of the concept outside an extremely limited range is inherently dubious, it seems clear that it is dispensable for most scientific purposes. In a theory of rational action, 'interest' may be assigned an exact meaning as part of a definite game, applying to a number of clearly demarcated social situations, on the market and elsewhere. But when used in more complex contexts to denote 'long-term', 'objective' or 'true' interests - that is to say, something other than factual preferences - the notion seems to provide a spurious objectivity to essentially ideological evaluations.” (146.) As I suggest or at least imply below, I think that spurious objectivity is often something that afflicts the person using ‘interest’ as category of analysis: they get high on their own supply, so to speak. Less flippantly, I mean to say this usage of interests as concept works against critical perspectives being self-reflexive in pretty pernicious ways.

Along similar lines he writes in his book The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology that idea of interests as pre-existing things in the world which motivate action “assumes that normative conceptions of what is good and bad and conceptions of what is possible and impossible are given in the reality of existence.” That assumption is false and “a utilitarian residue in Marxism, which should be rejected.” (5.)

Interests, Therborn writes, “do not explain anything.” Instead, they indicate “the most rational course of action in a predefined game, that is, in a situation in which gain and loss have already been defined.” (10.) Such situations definitely exist sometimes, but the people Riley and Therborn write against assume such situation exist more often than they do and, relatedly, don’t specify ways of (and likely lack adequate concepts for) sifting those kinds of situations from others.

Therborn stresses that interest is fundamentally “a normative concept.” (10.) It amounts to a judgment: when someone says a worker or group of workers or class acts on their interests they mean they’re doing what the speaker thinks is a good, reasonable course of action for someone in that situation. Such judgments are understandable - in my view they’re a necessary part of socialism as a political project - but as Therborn notes they’re not explanatory of anything. This gets at what is a big problem with interest-talk among Marxists, in my view (I think Therborn and Riley support this but I don’t want to put words in their mouths), namely that this talk tends to involve treating judgments as explanations.
Closely related, this kind of talk tends to involve an evasion of what Lenin called the soul of Marxism, concrete analysis of a concrete situation, while thinking one carried out such an analysis. To quote Therborn again, in “fall[ing] back on the crude utilitarian notion of ‘interest’” Marxists fail “to confront the problem of the ideological constitution of struggling class subjects” and the closely related problem of explaining “how members of different classes come to define the world and their situation and possibilities in it” as they do. (10. I’d add, and I think this fits with Therborn, Riley and Gilbert and Williams, that people’s subjective orientations - ideas, feelings, stories, culture, what have you - and their activities are at most only partially distinct from and logically downstream from ‘the world’ and ‘situations’ and possibilities in the world. That is, ‘world’ and ‘situation’ are already contexts of - patterned forms of - lived action and thought which are part of what constitutes possibilities. To borrow some terms from E.P. Thompson, social being and social consciousness are a package deal, they form a complex, dynamic, tension- and conflict-laden totality.)

As I’ve tried to say, it is reasonable to take ‘the world’’, the situation,’ and ‘possibilities’, as well as different classes’ understandings of them as givens sometimes, but it’s only reasonable sometimes. I think of this perhaps oversimplistically via Marx’s remark somewhere to the effect that theory becomes material when it grips the masses and the masses launch themselves into motion. That is, when serious struggle is underway, we find something we might reasonably call an interest, but we need to remember that this interest was constructed as part of the process of struggle, not a discovery the new knowledge of which provoked people to act, nor does ‘they’re acting in their interests’ explain anything about such contexts of struggle (nor about contexts where there isn’t such struggle, or struggle isn’t going the way we’d like). In my view, interest-talk of the type Riley and Therborn criticize amounts to going ‘I know what theory should grip the masses’ and thinking this is something other than a value judgment.

I want to be very clear I don’t think value judgments like this are any kind of problem. As I tried to say, I think they’re actually unavoidable. The error isn’t in being judgey, it’s in mistaking judgment for explanation and, at least some of the time, denying that the value judgment is one. As I’ve ranted about on here before I think a lot of Marxists have what are in my view straight up silly hang ups about morality. (EP Thompson polemicized about some similar hang ups in the late 1950s and early 1960s that he saw as part of the negative elements of the political culture of Stalinist Marxism. In my view that work remains worth reading not least because some similar negative elements persist in the present in unfortunate ways.) To be a little pointed, given that I think value judgments are just unavoidable in social analysis (I found some of it tough going and it’s not Marxist unfortunately but I quite like the philosopher Hilary Putnam’s short book The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays) which means anyone doing social analysis just is making value judgements, but doesn’t necessarily know they’re doing so. I think interest-talk is one way that people can make value judgments while denying they’re doing so (which again is in my very silly since to say ‘this action/is not in their interest’ or to identify an interest at all is to express a value judgment, as per Therborn).

I’m belaboring this point because I want to be clear that in rejecting ‘interests’ as something explanatory we are not left with a kind of chaotic situation where anything goes and we can neither explain nor judge. Far from it. We can explain and we can judge reasonably and explaining involves judgment (ie, values are baked in to social analysis), and we do so better if we know that’s what we’re doing because then we can discuss it and learn from the discussion. To put it more simply, I’m not rejecting, and I think Therborn does not reject, the idea that there is some “most rational course of action.” Rather, the issue is articulating why such a course of action is the best course, which requires a pretty thorough understanding of the actual context and also constituting a shared framework which defines ‘most rational’ - this is part of what I think is involved in what Therborn calls “the ideological constitution of struggling class subjects.” And that project of ideological constitution is something that, to borrow William Paris’s words, “is possible only through a refounded proletarian public sphere that will allow (…) critical concepts of society to circulate and enrich social experience.” I think Riley’s essay is a good contribution to that set of critical concepts, and I think Gilbert and Williams’s essay is as well and also implicitly a contribution to how to conceptualize that projet of ‘refounding’ a proletarian public sphere. More on that thought, maybe, once I eventually (or, if I ever manage to) finish Negt and Kluge’s book.